Permanent Digital Music

The Permanent Music: A real deal for the industry

Every stakeholder in the music supply chain keeps their own copy of the same files. Labels, distributors, streaming platforms, backup services, everyone's storing the exact same master recordings. It's wasteful, expensive, and completely unnecessary.

We're talking about an industry built on 70-100 year royalty agreements, managing assets that need to outlive most companies, doing it with the same digital storage model your uncle uses for vacation photos.

The Digital Storage Problem

The shift from physical to digital promised efficiency. Instead, the music industry created a digital storage nightmare. Multiple stakeholders duplicate every track: artist/studio, label, distributor, streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Tidal, etc.), backup services, archival services. A typical 40MB lossless master gets replicated at least 6-8 times = 240-320MB of redundant digital storage per track.

For 1 million tracks: 240-320TB of redundant storage costing the industry $42,000-56,000/month. That's conservative, not counting intermediate formats, geo-redundancy, or smaller players.

But redundancy doesn't mean availability. Each stakeholder operates in silos. Labels can't access distributor copies. Streaming platforms can't grab files from label servers. Despite 6+ copies existing, the industry regularly faces lost masters, version conflicts, access delays, and orphaned works whose ownership is disputed.

Universal Music's 2008 warehouse fire destroyed masters from Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and countless others. These were "backed up," yet somehow irreplaceable.

The problem isn't just digital storage, it's accessibility, verifiability, and chain of custody. What the industry needs is a unified digital storage layer that ties together the audio files with cryptographically verifiable ownership metadata—a real trusted enforcement system beyond the legal contracts that supposedly govern usage rights across different jurisdictions and commercial contexts.

The +70-Year Problem

Music rights last 70+ years past the author's life, sometimes 95 years flat. A track released today needs to remain accessible until 2095 or beyond.

Most companies managing these rights won't exist in 70 years. Tech companies come and go. Labels merge. Distributors get acquired. But legal obligations persist.

When Spotify gets acquired and shut down, when labels go bankrupt, when distributors' databases corrupt, when AWS sunsets S3 in 40 years, current answer: hope someone made backups.

Arweave's + Blockchain is the anwser: it's still there, exactly as uploaded, verifiable by anyone, owned by the initial creator or his inheritance. Artist or Label.

If music rights last 70+ years, digital infrastructure must match. Traditional cloud-based digital storage doesn't cut it. Only truly permanent, decentralized digital storage makes sense.

The Solution

Verifiable Metadata + Source of Truth + Controlled Access

This is where blockchain becomes more than hype, it's the perfect tool for proving authority, verifiability, and creation timestamps in a system where trust between parties is minimal and disputes span decades and can directly affect the capital generated by something.

Music rights are fragmented: master rights, publishing rights, performance rights, mechanical rights, sync rights, all tracked across separate databases. Labels, publishers, collection societies, distributors, blockchain projects all maintain partial records with no single source of truth. Disputes require comparing conflicting systems.

The architecture requires separating permanent storage (the immutable data layer) from access control (who can retrieve what, when). Permanent storage isn't enough alone—the masters need controlled access through gateways: HTTP interfaces that query the storage network. Multiple gateways (public, private, regional, CDN-cached) can all serve any file. If one fails, others work. Data layer stays separate from access layer.

The gateway game theory works both ways: As demand for easy access to masters increases, so does the incentive for third parties to run gateways—creating a competitive market where operators charge small fees for fast, reliable access. This creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where data permanence and data availability are economically aligned.

Pay Once, Store Forever

So what provides this permanent storage layer? Arweave, a storage network designed for permanent data storage. You pay once, your data stays forever. It is a critical change on how we are used to operate in the internet that permits other user experience for critical data regarding permanency and redundancy. In the same way blockchain introduced the trust and permanency layer over data, at a cost. Arweave introduces it to storage. Which add a new layer of possibilities. The question now is, which data is the most feasible to be permanent. As not all data and owners in the internet are incentivised and interested on paying for permanency.

The pricing mechanism calculates bytes uploaded multiplied by cost per byte (roughly one hundredth of a cent as of late 2024). A 40MB lossless track costs approximately forty cents for permanent storage.

$0.40. Once. Forever.

Compare to AWS S3 (traditional cloud-based digital storage): roughly 92 cents per month per stakeholder. Over 70 years, that's $773 per stakeholder. Multiply by six major stakeholders = $4,638 per track.

$0.40 versus $4,638 per track.

Scale to 100,000 tracks: $40,000 on Arweave versus $464 million in traditional cloud-based digital storage over 70 years.

Digital storage prices trend downward over time, but even accounting for that, the efficiency gap proves the point.

$0.40 for permanent storage vs $4,600 for 70 years of cloud storage isn't crazy. That's just math.

The mechanism works through an endowment model calculated to cover storage for 200+ years, assuming storage costs continue decreasing (which they have for 60+ years at 30-40% annually). Arweave's blockweave structure ensures permanence: miners must prove they're storing random old blocks to mine new ones. As the network grows, old data becomes more valuable to store, not less.

The Real Stack

Songs Protocol + Arweave + Nillion:

Arweave solves storage. But music needs metadata, rights, royalty flows, ownership splits, licensing. You need a full stack.

Songs Protocol (Blockchain) handles dynamic state: rights ownership that updates, royalty distribution that executes based on revenue, on-chain licensing agreements, revenue tracking. Everything requiring computation, consensus, and transparency.

Arweave (Permanent Storage) handles immutable data: master recordings, artwork, liner notes, legal documents, historical versions. Everything that must never change.

Nillion (Controlled Access Layer) handles encrypted storage and granular access control. Masters are stored encrypted on Arweave, but access permissions are validated on-chain and executed through Nillion's. Only authorized identities (verified licensees, rights holders, streaming platforms) can decrypt and access the masters, with all access attempts logged immutably.

How It Works

Here's the technical flow, from artist upload to streaming platform payout:

Let's imagine a future.

As an artist you are free to openly upload any track you want whenever you want to an open system out there proving that you created the track before anyone else. In the same way that having it in your computer, but, publicly and open. By doing it, it automatically creates the capital paths for the track to generate money and to set the different owners and legal participants of the earnings of the track. A song is more like a company in terms of its legal representation.

At this stage, distributor validators step in—these can be entities like DistroKid, labels, or decentralized streaming networks. Whenever a track is poised to generate revenue for its creators through official legal channels, some form of distribution and validation is essential. Validators thoroughly review the track: they check audio quality, ensure metadata is complete, verify rights and royalty splits, and confirm legal authority. Importantly, they will need to generate a cryptographic proof by using their wallet's private key to sign a hash of the release data. This signature serves as unforgeable proof that this specific validator approved this specific release at a precise moment in time. Validators then ensure the metadata and audio file are uploaded—either by performing the upload themselves or confirming the sovereign artist or label has done so—and kick off the monetization process. From this point, permanent storage via paid upload makes sense, because the master recording is now a finalized asset involving multiple stakeholders and is ready to generate revenue.

Validators stake reputation. Approve garbage, lose validator status onchain. Past signatures stay valid (history can't be rewritten), but they can't validate future releases. Economic incentives for honesty.

Arweave Upload: Validated releases upload as transactions with audio as payload, validation proof and metadata as tags (up to 2KB of key-value pairs). Tags become permanently queryable, search all releases by distributor, artist, or ISRC. Transaction ID is a SHA-256 hash becoming the permanent address (ar://[tx-id]). Deterministic, immutable, resolves to exact same data forever.

Blockchain Registry: Songs Protocol bridges the old and new. It takes the music industry's existing ISO standards and connects them to web3 primitives (cryptographic ownership, smart contracts, immutable records) and permanent storage (Arweave). Traditional identifiers become queryable on-chain keys:

• ISRC (International Standard Recording Code): Identifies the specific recording (US-AB1-23-45678). Used by Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, all PROs. Now becomes the on-chain primary key—query any ISRC, get cryptographically verified Arweave storage address, ownership splits, complete rights history. Same identifier the industry uses today, but with permanent verifiable storage underneath.

• ISWC (International Standard Musical Work Code): Identifies the composition (T-345246800-1). Same song covered by different artists = same ISWC, different ISRCs. Links master recordings to publishing rights. Traditional publishers already query by ISWC—now those queries return immutable on-chain records instead of conflicting databases.

• ISCC (International Standard Content Code): Content fingerprint generated from the file itself. Already designed for blockchain. Proves file integrity and prevents fraudulent uploads claiming existing ISRCs. Web3-native from day one.

Release struct: ISRC (primary) + ISWC + ISCC → Arweave URLs, metadata, ownership, royalty splits (basis points), temporal data, validation proof. The industry keeps using the same identifiers and workflows, but, it gets permanent storage, cryptographic verification, automated royalty splits, and immutable audit trails. Old ways enhanced with web3 guarantees.

Access Control: When a streaming platform or licensee requests access to a master, the request goes through Nillion's network. The smart contract validates the requester's on-chain license or rights, then Nillion provides decryption keys only to authorized parties. Every access attempt is logged on-chain: who accessed what, when, under which license. Artists and labels have full visibility into how their masters are being accessed and used.

Capital Flows: Revenue flows through smart contracts. Contract looks up ISRC, retrieves splits, distributes atomically. All-or-nothing, everyone gets paid according to splits in single transaction or entire thing reverts. No partial payments, no reconciliation errors.

Every payment visible onchain: sender, recipient, amount, timestamp. Publicly verifiable but pseudonymous. You can prove exactly what you were paid, when, by whom.

State Separation

Traditional infrastructure conflates mutable state (ownership, splits) with immutable data (audio files) in same database. When ownership changes, updating creates versioning nightmares and audit trail gaps.

Separating Arweave (immutable) from blockchain (trail controlled mutable) gives clean version control. Audio never changes, same URL forever. Ownership, splits, licensing evolve onchain with complete history preserved. Reconstruct exact ownership structure at any point in time.

Crucial for 70-year periods. When disputes arise decades later, blockchain has immutable record of every change, cryptographically signed, with exact timestamps.

Network Effects & Reality

This only works if the industry adopts it. One label using the system doesn't solve duplicity. One platform doesn't create source of truth. Value comes from everyone using the same layer, all of them. And for that to happen the incentives need to be aligned.

Classic network effect: first movers bear costs with minimal benefit, value increases exponentially as participants join, tipping point requires critical mass.

But economics are undeniable ($4,600 vs $0.40), legal requirements demand permanent storage, efficiency gains eliminate file transfer friction, and web3 momentum builds industry interest in blockchain rights management.

The technology exists today. Arweave is deployed and battle-tested. Songs Protocol smart contracts are straightforward. Integration involves standard transactions: upload to Arweave with tags, register onchain with ISRC and splits, distribute via contract calls.

Gas costs are predictable and cheap on L2s (Base, Arbitrum). A 3-way split costs ~100k gas, pennies on L2. One-time Arweave upload ($0.40) plus minimal blockchain operations versus massive recurring cloud costs.

What Happens

Artists upload once, get permanent immutable links, prove ownership cryptographically and publicly, licenses via automated smart contracts, stakeholders receive automatic royalty splits.

Labels eliminate digital storage infrastructure, preserve masters permanently, get instant rights verification, focus on A&R instead of IT.

Streaming platforms access via gateways, eliminate redundant digital storage costs, verify licensing onchain, reduce infrastructure to caching and transcoding.

Supply chain simplifies. Costs drop by orders of magnitude. Permanency gets guaranteed. Rights become verifiable.

The Bet

Will this happen? The music industry resists innovation until forced. But the economics are too compelling, legal requirements are being created as we talk, technology is at a tipping maturing point for it to happen.

Independent artists adopt first. Bottom-up momentum. Labels scramble when they realize they're paying 11,000x more for storage.

In the last 20 years, music turned from physical to digital, but, it did not yet found its final form.

Digital music will be as permanent and long lasting as a vinyl was, it will outlast companies, platforms, technologies.